Accepting Change in a Modern Workplace
About a third of the way through this interview with Astro Teller of Google X, he spends a few moments discussing the quickening pace of change in our modern world.
Several days ago I was reading this article on why conspiracy theorists believe what they do.
On the surface these two unrelated articles seem to have no connections. Astro Teller is discussing major historical events like the steam engine and the Scientific American article is pretty heavily influenced by the US elections, but my thoughts are really about a couple much more tactical business opportunities I've discussed focused on technology change within the workplace.
When you are looking at macros events in the marketplace, then trends toward big data and cloud computing seem inevitable.
Heck, I remember 20+ years ago when I was in R&D with EDS and our "Maya" massively parallel database server was accurately predicting the needs of big data. If only we'd predicted no-SQL and the move to commodity hardware :-) You can probably draw an chart that shows a pretty smooth exponential adoption rate in the marketplace for these technologies.
However, inside a given enterprise, the adoption rate is totally different. I can see very few reasons for on-premise email, non-IP telephony, non-SaaS enterprise apps, etc. So why are people still holding back? Yes there are a few good reasons. But I also suspect that a good part of the reason is emotional. People, including IT executives and their staff, fear the change. That this is just a way for the corporation to eliminate their job, deny their next raise and make their roles seem unimportant.
True, a good change management process could allay some of those fears but it is also true that some of those jobs will go away and some roles will no longer be of value. And this is where the thoughts from the second article struck me. If people believe in conspiracies because they feel that events are happening to them without their control or understanding and that the "conspiracy theory" gives them a framework that helps them to make sense of it all, then we as IT leaders need to address those concerns head on.
We need to give our people a better framework for understanding what is going on and how they can have control or else they will make up something else which is probably much worse.
This topic is worthy of much more than I can write at this moment, but I think it begins with leaders and our teams recognizing that our individual, intrinsic value to the enterprise needs to be more than just the role we are currently playing and that the ROI to the enterprise is higher when this becomes true vs. simply recycling their staff. I would argue that an engaged, flexible team will drive far better results for you every time. Get them involved, solicit ideas and move everyone forward together.